Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday May 09, 2010 @01:28PM
from the cool-and-collected dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos Magazine:
"Two tiny meteorites recently recovered from Antarctic snow contain material dating back to the birth of our Solar System, and may provide clues about the delivery of organic matter to Earth. Researchers believe that these micrometeorites likely came from the cold, comet-forming outer regions of the gas and dust cloud that comprised the early Solar System, and sample its composition. Discovered in 2006, the particles measure less than 0.25 mm across and survived their journey through Earth's atmosphere relatively unscathed. More importantly, scientists found that they contain unusually high amounts of organic matter."

re:"More importantly, scientists found that they contain unusually high amounts of organic matter."
Just before he choked, fell to the ground, and turned into a multi-tentacled extra terrestrial and savagely attacked the audience.

There seems to be a disagreement about whether or not organic materials just were here, formed here, or were brought here by an outside source. This article seems to be leaning towards the organic meteor theory but here's a fun question: where did the material on the meteor come from then? The answer is usually "another planet" but then why couldn't the materials have formed here just as easily?

Organic materials are just a class of chemicals - nothing to do with life as such. By now, it is pretty clear from spectroscopic measurements that the universe is full of simple organic matter like methane, methanol, ethanol, acetic acid, simple amino acids and the like. So it is not that surprising that this comet fragments carry organics. They form all the time, all over the place. This is of course essential for the formation for life, but the availability of small organics is not the critical step.

You're in MORE danger of proving the Bible right in MORE ways than disproving it.

This is science. We disprove things for a living. Positive proofs are for math. There will never be a scientific discovery that proves the Bible is, like you imply, a completely true book. Instead, there will continue to be discovery upon discovery that--no matter what the book's place as a fantastic piece of history, the collected stories and an artifact of the gestalt of a bronze-age-era tribe--simply proves the asserted fact

Organic matter != Life though. I'm not sure if Panspermia brought life to Earth or not, but the organic matter in comets isn't alive. It's just the building blocks that could potentally have been involved in life coming into being.

Organic matter can mean a lot of different things. Simple organic molecules may form in the gas clouds in space which give origin to planetary systems.

More complex molecules are a different thing, many of those require liquid water to form. The most plausible answer is that compounds such as methane were formed in space and accreted into earth and the other planets.

Then chemistry in the earth atmosphere and oceans built those into more and more complicated structures until life began.

That's easy. When a star goes nova, it does nucleosynthesis, which means that carbon (and lithium and oxygen etc) are synthesized by helium, which has been synthesized by hydrogen.
Now, Sun is third or fourth generation star, which means that it is made of leftovers of other stars which have gone nova (or supernova). Part of the staff of other stars was carbon.
As Carl Sagan used to say, our bodies are made by star dust.

The only proof there is, is that there are those who don't like my presence on the internet, anywhere on the internet. And that is the findings of mindspring investigation into complaints and the hacking of their server to make it look like I was complaining about myself. But they saw past they attempt.

There is a reason for the title "Anonymous Coward" and ultimately what are you really attacking here? NOVA and a research Scientist at the LHC?

Someone said redundant so I shouldn't let them down but rather make the post connection they broke, while being almost redundant about the following.

hmmm, so quick to judge, no surprise here on slashdot.then someone asks what is my source. Only if they would have read the blog entries and accessed the links given on the blogs.But then who here thinks NOVA (pbs) or scientist using the Large Hardon Collider have any clue what they are talking about?Oh wait, such fast judgements and quick comments haven't take

And you obviously are someone who thinks a mod score is what you are suppose to do to the poster modded.

try writing something relevant to the article. It may help hide your otherwise obvious intent.

Let me help: What do you suppose is going to happen when the LHC experiments advance our knowledge of what happened one millionth of a second after the big bang?Play catholic in denial (history repeating it self.... Galileo).

Or maybe you have some idea as to where the organic matter came from, before it was in sp

I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won.

Reading this, I started wondering why no religions form around new scientific discoveries about the origin of life. Widespread spiritual beliefs and offshoots still seem to form in these latter days, like Scientology, but none seem to form around scientific indications of the origin of life. Scientology, for example, prefers to believe in aliens - something unproven - rather than, say, panspermia, which is a more likely origin story.

Why aren't there worshippers of great panspermia being, whose seed rains do